Adding to that that you can also easily make a separate WiFi network (tied to a vlan even) for IoT. OpenWRT makes this very easy.

It really depends how you define reliability. SD cards are physically nigh indestructible, but can show failure when overwritten often. Hence for one off backups it’s actually a good alternative. It will start showing problems when used as a medium that often writes and overwrites the same data often.

I would recommend backups on SD cards in an A/B fashion when you want to give a backup to someone else to store safely.

Back in the day I bought a fridge freezer combo, second hand, no handles. Used to be a built in model. As handles I used two magnets from full height drives, they were ludicrously strong and shaped like a little bit like a handle.

Full height drives were 3.25" high for those who are wondering.

One logs into the VM and starts checking the files of course. Go from there.

Curious, you might want to look into what’s generating your data first. It’s easy to generate data, it’s harder to only keep the data that’s useful.

Curious, you might want to look into what is generating your data then first. It’s very easy to generate data, it’s a lot harder to only generate and keep useful data.

Consider running HA in a light weight systemd-nspawn container with minimal debian. No docker, only install the repositories you need. HACS if needed. Run your own database on the side somewhere and let HA use it.

By itself HA is fairly lightweight already.

I’m glad I can laugh about it now. The one thing this did do was educate a lot of people about the importance on off-site backups and off-site fail overs.

The humor is in the amount of hoops to jump through to get some basic info out using Powershell. Under Linux one would use a single command or just check what the system exposes in the form of a file.

I have no idea how to do forensics under Windows to be honest. You’d probably have to write something to get to the block layer so it can be dumped and analyzed. Perhaps OP can amuse us how he went about it.